A Limit on Subscription MMOs?

Posted on by Gazimoff

With Star Wars: The Old Republic being less than a month away, the game seems to be treading the well-worn path of other top-flight MMOs in charging a subscription. For $14.99 or £8.99 a month you’ll be able to clash lightsabers as much as you like. But is a subscription the right model to be using?

At face value a subscription seems to be ideal. Play as much as you like with all the content you want for a single monthly fee. You have the same character slots and the same bank space as everyone else. The only difference is in the box you buy and the extra goodies that come with it.

On the flip side though, subscriptions are also incredibly limiting if you want to play more than one game. It makes sense to pay monthly when you’re only playing one game, but if there’s another that you might only play occasionally you start to question the value of the subscription. It’s something that I’ve struggled with when trying to divide my time between Warcraft and Rift.

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SWTOR: Graphics, Galleries and Gifts

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s been a busy weekend, mostly consisting of digging further into the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta and avoiding The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. It’s not that I don’t want to play the game, it’s just that I have a stack of unfinished or unplayed stuff building up because I’m immersed in one MMO or another. I swear that the MMO genre has become the biggest excuse ever for not completing single-player games these days.

During the weekend I decided to dust off the old Youtube channel and start uploading some footage from the SWTOR beta. One of the most common questions I get asked is if it’ll run on x PC or y spec. Although I made a bit of an attempt to address this during my First Impressions post, I figured that it’d be great to show you what I mean.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic – First Impressions

Posted on by Gazimoff

The NDA for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been lifted and I’m finally free to share my opinions with you. In theory this would mean that I’d be unleashing a huge mega-post containing details of every single nuance about the game. I’m going to resist the urge and scale back a little bit on this, instead focusing on a couple of key areas.

I’m going to go into a bit of detail about my experiences with the two “caster” force classes in the game: the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor, along with the Jedi Sage and Sith Sorcerer advanced classes. I’ll also be talking a little bit about how SWTOR advances the MMO genre and the areas in which it falls back a little.

I’ll be concluding this post with a look about how the game performs on a range of systems. If you’re wondering if your PC will handle SWTOR or whether you should upgrade then feel free to skip ahead to this section.

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The Supermassive Beta

Posted on by Gazimoff

How many beta testers does it take to change a lightbulb?

The rather surprising answer is 89.

  • Fifty to just carry on as if light doesn’t matter and continue killing swamp rats or whatever.
  • Ten to raise a ticket complaining about the complete lack of lightbulb operation and DEMANDING that it be rectified THIS INSTANT.
  • Two to proclaim that lightbulbs themselves are overrated, and that when they started playing MMOs all they had was candles. And they jolly well liked it.
  • Five to argue that lightbulbs could actually do with a buff
  • Six to counter-argue that it’s actually daylight that needs to be buffed, and that lightbulbs themselves are slightly overpowered.
  • One to troll the entire discussion by stating that “lightblbs r for lozers lol”
  • Fifteen to give up the mission in frustration, going on a textual tirade about the pointlessness of lightbulbs and asking who designs a stupid quest around lightbulbs anyway.

And one level designer who sighs inwardly as he moves the light switch to a more prominent location.

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The Unknown Warcraft Subscriber

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a flurry of commentary recently on the recent earnings call by Activision Blizzard, where they provide some highlights on their third quarter performance. If you’re interested in reading through the entire transcript of the call you can find it at Seeking Alpha.

There are a couple of quick facts to pull out: Warcraft has dropped by nearly 2 million subscriptions to 10.3 million worldwide. Most of the loss is thought to be in China, an area which represents over 50% of the total subscriber base. The estimated rough split is approximately 5 million subscribers in the Far East, 3 million in US/Aus and 2 million in Europe/Russia.

There’s also the news on how much money Blizzard has made in the last quarter. The developer made nearly $300 million in revenue and $140 million in income – that’s a healthy profit margin of around 40% once tax gets factored in. Whichever way you slice the cake, Blizzard’s in a strong position considering that it’s not had a major release this year.

There’s only one snag with the information that’s been given to us. Although it’s easy to judge the overall performance of the company, it becomes difficult to judge the performance of Warcraft as an MMO. People will point to subscriber numbers going down and predict that this means doom for the game. That’s just simply not possible to do with the information we have available.

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The Gates of Compelling Rewards

Posted on by Gazimoff

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re somehow missing something when you read a particular piece of news? That’s how I felt when I was reading over Ghostcrawler’s latest blogppost where he talks about item stat inflation and the problem it presents. While it’s a great article that hints at some difficult choices ahead, I’m not sure we’re seeing the whole picture.

The big clue for me was in the phrase “we want rewards to be compelling”. Think about this for a moment as I’ll be coming back to it later.

The problems around itemisation extend far beyond just deciding what numbers to put in the tooltip. There’s also ramifications across the game, from how we experience levelling through to the performance of the game client on our machine. Get it wrong and there could be a whole world of problems. It’s why the Squish versus No Squish argument is more complex than just what kind of number we want to see.

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The Necessity of End Game

Posted on by Gazimoff

Today’s article is a guest post from Honor’s Code.

Let me put on my armchair Game Designer hat for a moment. Put yours on as well and join me as we think about AAA MMOs.

I think we can agree on the goal. All of us, from the bean counters at production houses, to the developers, the QA Testers, to the players themselves, want a great game. What we want to create is a great ride, an experience if you will. We want an experience that can be picked up and enjoyed and shared with a wide variety of people. This is necessary to create a reliable and sustainable fan base which in turn brings in enough revenue, with whatever business model is used, to keep the servers running and keep us and our employees gainfully employed.

While we can all agree on the goal, how to get there is the topic of vigorous debate. At a high level, we want an immersive world with many fun activities to engage in. We know that different people find different activities fun, so we will need a wide range of activities. We don’t want to force any players to do things they find ‘unfun’ so many of those activities will need to be optional.

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Mobile MMO Missteps

Posted on by Gazimoff

At the moment I’m on holiday, which probably explains why I’ve been a bit lax on updates. While for some that might mean hitting the nearest beach and putting their head into a good book, for me it means working out just how many of my glorious gadgets I can take with me.

What started out as a sackful of handheld games consoles, MP3 players and so on has nowadays shrunk down to a smartphone and a laptop. While having the laptop is handy for occasional sessions in Warcraft when I can get a good wifi connection, I tend to use my smartphone for my mobile gaming needs.

This predictably ended up with me giving mobile MMO gaming a try. Buoyed on by Massively’s MMOBility column I downloaded a few titles and gave it a go. Unfortunately the experience was incredibly disappointing, and while I share Beau Hindman’s optimism about the future of the genre I think that these games make several important missteps.

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Looking Through The Mists

Posted on by Gazimoff

This weekend has been a firehose of information. Although I’ve never been to a BlizzCon in-person (something I hope to rectify), I’ve been glued to the internet and live streams for information. There’s nothing quite like getting the latest on a games franchise straight from the source.

Like a good meal, it takes a while for me to digest and fully appreciate all the news that emerges. Now that I’m able to sit back and reflect on the dishes presented to us, I feel I’m ready to share my opinions on each delicate morsel that appeared.

There’s a lot to go through, both good and bad. From the changing pace of Azeroth’s story to the abolition of talent trees, from missed opportunities to interesting ideas, I’ll be giving my opinions on all the major topics. Grab yourself a drink, as this may take a while.

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The Declining MMO Market

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s been a couple of great articles recently about the situation at CCP, publishers of EVE Online. The theory is that the company hasn’t been doing as well as it hoped following the White Wolf Publishing acquisition and has been losing both staff and subscribers ever since. I’d suggest reading Tobold’s summary of the situation if you’d like to know more there.

The question it creates is where this leaves MMO gaming as a whole. The general feeling is that we should be set for a decline in the popularity of the genre. Studios may end up closing doors and games may end up being taken offline. It’s a bit of a grim scenario.

There’s a question that I have to ask though – how much of this is to do with players getting tired of a particular game? If the universe you’ve been playing in hasn’t changed much in the past few years then wouldn’t you get bored and move on? Likewise, has the developer looked at chasing new customers to replace the ones that have left?

Ultimately there’s a known truth – players will only try your game for so long before they get bored or tired of it and move on. You need to have alternatives out there that players can easily switch to when that happens, otherwise they’re likely to become someone else’s customers.

You can see Blizzard do this with Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and Titan – a range of game styles for people to switch between. It’s also been the strategy of Perfect World, NCSoft and others. This is where CCP has been stuck. As EVE becomes less popular they have no alternatives to offer. World of Darkness was supposed to be that, but it’s been kicked into the long grass.

I do agree with Tobold to an extent. The MMO market is due for a shake-up. But while I think that some games may change fundamentally, I don’t think that we’ll see any switch off completely. There’s always a way to to keep an old game running.

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